Snooks Eaglin: On the Trail of the Most Elusive
Guitar Player in New Orleans
by Karl Bremer

It’s
after midnight the Monday following the first weekend of the New Orleans
Jazz & Heritage Festival. People are still streaming up the stairs
to Mid-City Lanes Rock’n’Bowl, an appropriately tacky second-floor bowling
alley-cum-nightclub located above a strip mall in the city’s midtown
district.

Tenpins clatter in the background
as sun-soaked Jazz Festers unwind with some late-night frames and more
than a few bottles of Abita. Over the house intercom someone announces
a cheeseburger order. The dance floor that runs the length of the bowling
alley is comfortably filled with a mix of out-of-towners, locals and
a number of musicians enjoying a night off-stage. Some are dancing,
some mingling and talking, but a large number of them are simply staring
at the stage grinning in amazement.

Above the din is a guitar sound
so pure and crisp the notes sizzle as they fly off the strings. If you
didn’t know better, you’d think there were two guitars playing. A Professor
Longhair-like piano trill calls out in the background and a high-pitched
voice cackles, "Play it, Cleary!"

Perched on a chair in the middle
of the stage is Snooks Eaglin, compact and slightly stoop-shouldered
with a stocky, almost muscular upper torso, his slender legs and knobby
knees sticking out of a pair of shorts. The blind 63-year-old guitar
virtuoso cocks his right arm back, floats his claw-like fingers across
the strings of his red Epiphone hollow body guitar like a butterfly
and stings them like a bee. You almost expect to see sparks fly off
the tips of his sculpted fingers.

"Y’all hear that?" he
shouts, flashing an impish grin framed by a thin black mustache and
a stubble goatee.

Eaglin is plainly enjoying himself
and pushes guest pianist Jon Cleary to turn up the heat. Cleary obliges
with a romp through Professor Longhair’s "Tipitina." Snooks
was Fess’ favorite guitar player, and the pairing with Cleary, a Longhair
disciple, goes together like a knife and fork.

Delightful to listen to and a marvel
to watch, Snooks confounds even the best players with his inimitable
finger-picking style. Radiators lead guitarist Camile Baudoin is on
the dance floor, giddy with laughter. "When Snooks plays, that’s
all I can do is laugh it, makes me feel so good," Baudoin chortles.
"Nobody plays like Snooks Eaglin. Nobody."

They Broke the Mold

Snooks was born Fird Eaglin Jr.
(often seen on credits and liner notes as "Ferd" or even "Ford")
January 21, 1936, in New Orleans. At 19 months he lost his sight following
an operation for glaucoma and a brain tumor that required a two-and-a-half
year stay in the hospital.

Eaglin’s father, a harmonica player,
gave him a guitar at the age of five, and young Snooks taught himself
to play by replicating songs off the radio and phonograph. Fird Sr.
had an acetate recording machine, and the two would often jam together
to make home recordings in the evenings. As much as his blindness may
have made his life difficult in other ways, the younger Eaglin used
it to his advantage to invent an original playing style that no one
yet has deciphered and compile an ear-popping repertoire that today
tops 2,500 songs.

A little troublemaker himself, Fird
Jr. was given the nickname "Snooks" after a mischievous radio
character named Baby Snooks. (That mischievous streak still shows up
in his occasionally bawdy, mid-song stage banter.) His guitar playing
developed rapidly and he was singing and playing in area Baptist churches
by the time he was ten. At the age of 11, Snooks won first place and
$200 in a local WNOE radio talent contest with his guitar rendition
of "Twelfth Street Rag," and that encouraged him to practice
even harder. Three years later he dropped out of the school for the
blind to become a full-time musician.

Eaglin’s first regular gig was with
the Flamingoes in 1952, a seven-piece horn combo started by 13-year-old
Allen Toussaint on piano. It was Toussaint’s first band, too, and he
also served as musical director. Along with rival Art Neville’s band,
the Hawketts, the Flamingoes were one of New Orleans’ most popular R&B
groups, playing school dances and social and pleasure club events.

One story Eaglin tells has him driving
the band’s 1949 Studebaker back to New Orleans from a gin-soaked gig
in Donaldsonville late one night. With the rest of the band members
too hammered to get behind the wheel, Snooks told Offbeat magazine
in a 1995 interview, one of them asked him, "‘Hey, Snooks, you
wanna drive this sucker home, baby?’ I said, ‘Y’all suckers better just
sleep — I’m gonna bring ya home.’"

But before they hit the road they
had another problem to resolve. "The car didn’t have no water in
it. I said, ‘I’ll give you all the water you need, baby!’" After
the band members relieved themselves into the car’s radiator, down the
road they went with Eaglin at the wheel. "I damned near liked to
burn myself," said Eaglin. The gravel on the side of the road alerted
him to the need to steer the car back to the center, Snooks claimed,
and miraculously, the band arrived safely home early on Sunday morning.

"That’s a true story, baby,"
Eaglin insists.

Even while playing with the Flamingoes,
Snooks was making a name for himself and picking up side gigs. By 1953
he was recording with Sugar Boy Crawford in his backing band, the Cane
Cutters, and played on Crawford’s biggest record, the Mardi Gras classic,
"Jock-a-Mo."

The Flamingoes were managed in part
by Snooks’ father. After he died and Toussaint left the band, the Flamingoes
disbanded. Snooks had a small R&B combo of his own and worked a
variety of musical jobs as a sideman in the ’50s, sometimes billing
himself as "Little Ray Charles."

If club or studio work was sparse,
Eaglin often would play on the street for tourists in the French Quarter.
That’s where Dr. Harry Oster, a folklorist from Louisiana State University
in Baton Rouge, found the 22-year-old Eaglin in 1958. Oster recorded
more than three albums worth of mostly country blues material by Snooks
in 1958 and 1960–’61, accompanied on several numbers by Lucius Bridges
on washboard or guitar and Percy Randolph on harmonica and washboard.

According to one account, Eaglin
was supposed to record another session with Oster, accompanying the
popular pre-war husband-and-wife blues duo Billie and Dee Dee Pierce,
but Snooks never showed for the session.

The Oster recordings, released on
the Folkways, Folklyric and Prestige labels, drew some attention to
this new discovery. But the attempt to pigeonhole Eaglin as a country
blues street musician was too confining for a young man who already
had built an impressive and wide-ranging repertoire that stretched from
traditional to pre-war blues, standards and spirituals to the R&B
hits of the late ’40s and ’50s.

Snooks’ life changed in 1959, when
he met his wife and constant companion of 38 years, Dorthea, or "Dee."
She was waiting outside a New Orleans hall for a gig to begin when Snooks
and the band’s drummer pulled up. She asked if she could wait in the
car until the doors opened, and after talking with the musicians for
a spell in the car, assisted Snooks into the hall. He came over to her
table at the set break; the rest is history. Two years later they were
married, and they’ve been virtually inseparable ever since.

Meanwhile, Eaglin’s musical career
was taking another turn.

New Orleans bandleader/songwriter/trumpeter
Dave Bartholomew, who had produced a string of hits at the locally-based
Imperial label for more than a decade, signed Snooks in 1960 and produced
seven sessions with him through 1963.

Sidemen
on those sessions included New Orleans Piano Prince James Booker and
a host of other Crescent City regulars who had worked with Bartholomew
at Imperial. The material was perfectly suited for Eaglin, who had grown
up with and now played much of the music written or produced by Bartholomew
and recorded by his impressive stable of artists: Fats Domino, Smiley
Lewis, Earl King, Lloyd Price, the Spiders, Roy Brown, Chris Kenner
and others.

The sessions resulted in nine singles
that brought Snooks regional acclaim but never vaulted him onto the
national R&B scene in a big way. The Imperial era did put some distance
between Snooks and his reputation as a country blues singer, which he
reportedly disdained.

There was a definite attempt to
bring a more soulful, Ray Charles feel to some of his Imperial recordings.
Snooks’ voice was maturing, and the inclusion of Booker and horns to
some of the sessions brought a fuller, richer dimension to the more
sparse context in which Snooks had recorded before. Many of the Imperial
sides remain in the rotation of Snooks’ vast repertoire today. But other
than some stellar session work, they would be the last Snooks Eaglin
records to be made until 1987.

Eaglin continued to work the New
Orleans club circuit sporadically throughout the ’60s, including a three-year
stand at the Playboy Club. He and Dee, who had become Snooks’ de facto
manager, moved to Donaldsonville, about midway between New Orleans and
Baton Rouge, and then to St. Rose just west of New Orleans in 1970 and
went into semi-retirement.

Snooks, Fess and the Indians

In 1971, the planets lined up with
the sun and the moon, and an historic event took place at the fledgling
New Orleans Jazz & Heritage Fest. After a long search with Allison
(Miner) Kaslow, festival producer Quint Davis located lost legend Henry
Roeland Byrd, better known as Professor Longhair, or Fess, living in
obscurity in New Orleans. Davis teamed him up with Snooks for a performance
that stunned the Jazz Fest crowd and propelled Byrd’s star as a "rediscovered"
piano patriarch of New Orleans.

Shortly thereafter, Eaglin recorded
an album for the Swedish Sonet label in June 1971, The Legacy of
the Blues, Part 2, that was produced by Davis. Later that year Davis
and Parker Dinkins arranged for a Baton Rouge recording session with
Fess, Eaglin, drummer Shiba (Edwin Kimbraugh) and Will Harvey Jr. on
bass, where 34 demo tracks were cut. The demos caught the ear of Atlantic
Records’ Jerry Wexler and Albert Grossman, who was then managing the
Band, and they brought them to Bearsville Studios in Woodstock, NY,
for some more sessions.

Eaglin wasn’t particularly comfortable
in Woodstock and complained, according to one widely circulated story,
that the sound of falling snow on the rooftop kept him awake at night.

For whatever reasons, the Woodstock
sessions never worked out for Wexler and Grossman. Davis took the group
to New York for another session with Earl Turbinton on sax and George
Davis on bass, and another in Memphis in 1972 with Joseph "Zigaboo"
Modeliste on drums. But the tapes from all those sessions, including
the Baton Rouge demos, languished at Bearsville for years until they
were unearthed and released in 1987 on Rounder Records as Professor
Longhair’s House Party New Orleans Style: The Lost Sessions 1971–72.
The disc remains one of the definitive Longhair collections available
today, with Eaglin’s searing guitar, sublime phrasing and intricate
fills providing the perfect foil for Fess’ rollicking syncopated piano.

Quint Davis launched another landmark
project that involved Eaglin in 1973 when he approached New Orleans
keyboardist Wilson Turbinton, a k a Willie Tee, about assembling a band
to back a recording by the Wild Magnolias Mardi Gras Indian group.

Turbinton recruited his brother
Earl on sax and clarinet, Eaglin on guitar, Julius Farmer on bass, Larry
Panna on drums and Alfred "Uganda" Roberts on congas and called
it the New Orleans Project. The band provided the fuel for a fiery blend
of New Orleans funk, driving Indian percussion, the raspy-sweet vocals
of Big Chief "Bo" Dollis and the steady rhythms of Big Chief
Monk Boudreaux.

The New Orleans Project went up
to Studio in the Country in Bogalusa, Louisiana, recording the music
tracks before the Indians arrived. Turbinton wrote some songs based
on old Indian chants and threw in a mix of his and the Magnolias’ own
arrangements of some New Orleans traditionals. Out of the session came
The Wild Magnolias, originally released on Polydor in 1974 and
re-released in 1993. "It was the rhythm of seduction," producer
Philippe Rault recalls in the liner notes, "with plenty of Mad
Dog 20/20 to go around."

The record was the first broad commercial
exposure of New Orleans’ unique Mardi Gras Indian culture to the rest
of the world, and probably for Snooks Eaglin’s playing as well. His
churning guitar licks slash and burn behind Willie Tee’s funked-up keyboards
and brother Earl’s wailing sax to forge a deadly groove with the Wild
Magnolias. This is probably Snooks’ wildest workout ever recorded, even
utilizing a considerable — and uncharacteristic — amount of wah-wah
and other distortion.

Erving Charles replaced Snooks on
guitar for the Wild Magnolias’ brief tours to the East Coast and Europe
following the release of the album. Eaglin returned to play on one track
of the Wild Magnolias’ follow-up, They Call Us Wild, in 1975,
and their 1990 Rounder release, I’m Back … at Carnival Time!.

The Black Top Renaissance

Eaglin continued to play at the
annual JazzFest and around the clubs of New Orleans sporadically throughout
the ’70s. But his recording career remained inactive and public profile
low until the mid-’80s, when Black Top Records’ Hammond Scott finally
convinced Snooks to return to the studio.

Baby, You Can Get Your Gun
was the first in a string of terrific Black Top outings that numbers
six to date, including a pairing last year with Crescent City pianist
Henry Butler. Released in 1987, it sparkles with Snooks’ hand-polished
treatment of such gems as Tommy Ridgley and Dave Bartholomew’s mournfully
sweet "Lavinia," a nod to the Ventures on "Profidia,"
the finger-popping Earl King-penned title song, and Eaglin’s own 20-megaton
funk theme, "Drop the Bomb."

Snooks’ return to recording brought
with it a new vitality in his singing and playing; it was obvious he
hadn’t been just sitting around all those years. Surrounded by a gang
of hellfire musicians from the Black Top roster, Snooks Eaglin emerged
in the late ’80s to a whole new audience of fans who had never had the
opportunity to see him perform live, nor heard any new material from
this living legend.

Most musicians mellow a bit as they
get older. But Snooks Eaglin isn’t like most musicians, and if anything,
he’s gotten funkier in his later years. His playing still is sharp as
saw grass, and he gets more crisp tones out of a straight guitar and
amp than the average player gets from a bank of effects pedals.

His voice has gotten better with
age, richer and more expressive. His range sounds greater than ever
— including his absurd falsetto "Lillie Mae" alter ego that
comes out in the middle of his live shows. He has an uncanny ability
to adapt his voice to capture the very essence of every song he sings,
yet still leave his own signature on it.

A romantic crooner one minute, a
blues shouter the next; mournful and joyful in the same mouthful. That’s
Snooks Eaglin.

"He’s one of the most naturally
talented people I’ve ever met," says keyboardist/producer Ron Levy,
who played with Snooks on Baby You Can Get Your Gun, the stellar
1989 follow-up Out of Nowhere, and also I’m Back … at Carnival
Time! "He can play any song just off the top of his head. If
he can think about it and hear it in his head, he can play it perfectly,"
Levy enthuses. "He didn’t have to learn it — he’d just do it. I
never heard him play a bad note. And even if he played something that
was wrong, he’d make it right.

"He’ll just all of a sudden
start playing some Hendrix stuff — perfectly, with the same exact tone.
What Hendrix overdubbed himself two or three times, Snooks does it all
at once. He never ceases to amaze you."

Playing live with Snooks is something
else, says Levy. "Most people tell you the key, the name of the
song, or they’ll count the song off. He’ll just say, ‘Ready, go!’ But
he never loses you, as crazy as that sounds. You always know what he’s
gonna do. His concept is so direct and pure you can’t help it."

New Orleans bassist George Porter
Jr., a regular partner of Snooks’ on stage and in the studio for the
past decade, agrees.

"It’s ears-up playing with
Snooks," laughs Porter. "‘If you follow me, you can’t go wrong,’
he’ll tell you. You have to have a certain knowledge of intervals to
know what he’s playing." Playing out of Snooks’ songbook is fun,
Porter says, "because a great part of what he’s playing was a part
of my growing up, so a lot of those songs I knew. But there are some
songs that he’d pull out sometimes that would throw me for a loop."

In the beginning, Porter remembers,
"I used to always try to sit in front to look at his hands. But
then I noticed that sometimes his guitar was strung up wrong — his hands
are in the right place on the frets but the string is in the wrong tuning
place. I just decided to stop looking at his hands. He has a formula
that works only for him."

Many guitarists, professional and
amateur alike, do look at Snooks’ hands, studying them intensely as
he flails the strings at lightning speed. Most often, they end up simply
shaking their heads as they walk away. On the genealogical tree of guitar
styles, there will always be a separate branch for Snooks Eaglin.

Levy warmly recalls his days with
Black Top. "We used to hang out a lot in New Orleans — Hammond
Scott, myself, a bunch of other people — and Snooks would be there,
and he’d just play by himself. And he’d play the melody, the bass, the
chords, it seemed like all at the same time.

"One of these times we were
just partying and Snooks was sitting in the corner playing, and he sounded
great. But after awhile I noticed that he was missing a couple strings
on his guitar but it didn’t seem to make any difference. He still sounded
great."

Radiators bassist Reggie Scanlan
says playing with Snooks "is kind of like the guitar version of
playing with Fess." He remembers the first time he was called to
fill in behind Eaglin at the last minute. "It was me and Snooks
and Smokey Johnson on drums." And even though he knew many of the
songs Snooks played, there were a few surprises.

"It was like being hit by a
big storm and being taken along for the ride," says Scanlan, himself
a Professor Longhair alumnus. "There were a couple of things that
night that I didn’t even play on they were so obscure. Part of the fun
is not knowing what he’s going to do — the thrill is in hanging on."

Brit-turned-Crescent
City keyboardist Jon Cleary has played with Snooks on and off over the
past 10 years or so and says it’s no mean feat keeping up with Eaglin
by watching him play. "It’s hard to tell what chords he’s playing
because of his fingers. They’re like talons, they’re so long. And he
doesn’t use a pick."

Cleary, who keeps busy playing in
Bonnie Raitt’s band and with his own band, the Absolute Monster Gentlemen,
was delighted to work with Snooks again in April. "The challenge
is to support him without getting in his way," he says. "I
grew up playing here in town with Walter Washington. I’m a guitar player
myself, and I know what I want to hear from a piano." That means
playing "sympathetically" behind Snooks. "It allows him
to do what he does and play all the busy stuff."

A light fan of the strings here,
a staccato burst of notes there. A finger-picked melody amplified by
a machine-gun power chord. A flamenco flourish followed by some classic
R&B phrasings. It always seems to work for Snooks.

It’s just as unlikely that anyone
will figure out Snooks the Person any time soon, either.

Long known for his quirky, suspicious
ways, Eaglin avoided recording contracts from the time he left Imperial
in 1963 until he signed with Black Top in 1987. He rarely agrees to
interviews, much to the dismay of his label. And when he does, he sometimes
backs out of them, as he did for this article.

"He’s an interesting character
outside the fact that he’s an excellent musician," says Porter.
"He’s not a very trusting person. I guess having the disadvantage
of not being able to see, it’s like, things that go wrong around him
are multiplied because someone else has to deal with them."

Porter says Eaglin was reluctant
to do his last album, Live in Japan. "He’s not felt very
good about live recordings — and with merit. But the people came to
me and asked me to convince Snooks that they would do a good job. And
it took a great deal of convincing for me to get Snooks to do it."

Produced by Eaglin himself, the
effort is a terrific representation of Snooks live, even though it lacks
the intimacy of seeing him up close in a small New Orleans nightclub.

His religion reportedly keeps him
from playing dusk on Friday until dusk on Saturday. Explains Levy: "He’s
a Seventh Day Adventist. He keeps an Old Testament Sabbath — Friday
night to Saturday night. I admire him for that. He sticks to his convictions."

So well, in fact, that on tour with
Snooks, Levy said, "When it was Friday night, me and the rest of
the fellows would go out and play with someone else, and he and his
wife, Dee, would honor their Sabbath."

Porter says Snooks also honored
"any and all religious holidays. That meant a lot of days in the
year Snooks wasn’t working."

Eaglin got sick in the fall of 1993
and reportedly decided he wouldn’t leave his house until the following
summer. Word on his condition was mum for months, until he finally surfaced
in the spring and announced he was ready to play, just in time for the
1994 Jazz & Heritage Fest. A collective sigh of relief could be
heard from worried fans everywhere.

Eaglin’s personnel decisions sometimes
are equally mysterious.

Long-time associate Porter says
Snooks told him in April that his JazzFest appearance backing Snooks
would be his last. And at that time, Porter still was clueless as to
why. "I’m puzzled," he says, although he has heard some rumors
through the grapevine. And sure enough, the night after his JazzFest
set, George Porter was nowhere to be seen on Snooks’ stage.

Cleary played with Snooks regularly
in the late ’80s and early ’90s and got a call out of the blue for his
post-JazzFest gig with him. "This was the first time in ages,"
says Cleary. "My agent got a call from the club owner (John Blancher
at Rock’n’Bowl). Snooks had been in there and heard some of my stuff
on the radio and decided on the spur of the moment that he wanted me
to play with him for that gig."

The Human Jukebox

Eaglin’s amazing repertoire and
tape-recorder-like ability to play back virtually anything he hears
has earned him another nickname over the years: the Human Jukebox.

It’s de rigueur for his set
lists to be called out from the dance floor. Don’t like what Snooks
is playing at the moment? Stick around and request your own favorite.

"What do Y’all wanna hear next?"
Snooks shouts out from his perch on the bandstand.

"Get your ‘Red Beans’ cookin’,
Snooks!" the call comes back.

"‘Red Beans?’ Alright! Ready,
Jon? Hit it!"

Snooks flies into a finger-picking
frenzy as the dance floor boils like a crawfish pot. People are bouncing
hip-to-hip, sloshing cold beer on each other and loving every minute
of it, while club owner Blancher twists the night away on the side of
the stage.

It’s just like the T-shirt says:
"There’s nothin’ more New Orleans than Snooks at the Rock’n’Bowl,
Y’all!" And as long as this "Human Jukebox" wants to
keep playing, I’ll keep plugging in the quarters to hear him.